How DSLR allowed Simon to make great video while keeping a low profile in a country that is largely out of bounds to western media.

I have been involved in production and post production and taking photographs for over a decade now. When I saw the videos shot by Vincent Laforet and Dan Chung on the 5DmkII it was immediately apparent that I should invest in one.

After testing it out on a low budget video production, where it happened to save the day, I wanted to put the 5DmkII through its paces and I conjured up the idea of traveling through Myanmar.

Low profile shooting in Myanmar

Without delving into the intricacies of the situation there, what really set the tone before I went was the advice of an acquaintance who had set up an NGO in Myanmar. In essence, I ought to be wary approaching people and broaching sensitive subjects as this could seriously compromise them with the powers that be. They would be the ones to bear the consequences of the exchange, whether or not they imparted anything that might rattle the established order. I also heard that the military were less than fond of people taking pictures of them. Actually, I didn’t have a pressing journalistic agenda for this trip but I wanted at least to have a good look and get a feel for the place.

I had reason to suspect that my luggage would be checked on arrival so I purposely limited my equipment and decided not to bring any professional audio gear. I thought too many accessories would make the 5D appear more journalistic – otherwise it appears like any DSLR carried by tourists enthusiastic about photography. Light and low profile was the order of the day.

I took 3 Canon L lenses, an essential ND filter for shooting video, a polarizer screw on, step down rings for all the lenses and the very light and compact Gitzo traveler tripod. I also had a rain cover, which came in very handy when riding around in a powered boat. Finally, I bought an Archos 5 Internet Media tablet, to which I could connect a CF card reader and transfer files. I could also view jpgs on the Archos, though it wasn’t quite up to playing 1080p. All my equipment, except the 5DmkII body with lens, fitted comfortably into a small backpack and could go with me wherever I went.

Shooting with the raincover on

I used a simple guidebook to help navigate my way around the country. I was on my own time and could ramble around, seeking out things that interested me, choosing favorable shooting positions and waiting for good light. It was an enjoyable process. I could happily labour over composition, exposure and the use of filters. I could easily go around on foot or bicycle, even trek through forest and traverse hills with all the equipment. I could walk up hundreds of steps and then shoot the emerging vista in HD. The limitation with camera support meant that I had static camera the whole time, but I’m quite happy with what I achieved.

Myanmar is very hot and I would say that the most useful equipment I had – second only to the more technologically advanced sun block – was a hat. Luckily, I didn’t have any problems with the camera overheating. The equipment was very light and performed admirably and did not impede my travels at all. The Myanmar I discovered was a friendly one; certainly a place that seems wealthier in spirit than in anything else.

You can contact Simon and see more of his work here http://www.emotefilms.com/

By David Friedman, photojournalist & multimedia producer, msnbc.com

“The earthquake happened. Now we cannot live here. We can’t. It’s unsecure,” Ramon Crespo told the dozen Haitian orphans gathered under a tarp for a somber meeting. It was six days after the earthquake and the orphans and staff had spent those days living in a makeshift camp – in limbo – in the garden. The meeting was a pivotal moment in the tale of the orphans and the church group caring for them. It was a moment I knew I needed to shoot as video, edit, transmit and get published on our site as quickly as possible that morning.

Reporter Bill Dedman and I were embedded with members of a church group from Allentown, Penn. They headed to Port-au-Prince the day after the quake to take care of the children at the Rescue Children orphanage, which their church ran. We were staying with them and publishing daily updates on their story in blog form on news website msnbc.com.

The wrap-up piece we produced after the trip, Bill Dedman narrates.

While Bill was covering the written word, my task was to shoot and transmit both stills and video from the field daily and gather material for a comprehensive piece afterward. For the first time in my career as a multimedia producer at msnbc.com I was doing both with the same camera, a Canon 5D MkII – that’s a big deal. Trying to shoot both well on a single, developing story is always complicated, so the ability to do both with a single camera is nothing short of revolutionary.
The point in the weeklong trip when I was fully convinced of the DSLR revolution was the morning of that meeting. Mission leader Crespo told the orphans they would leave their home in two days. The church group had grown increasingly concerned for the children’s safety as the days progressed and relief had yet to reach the surrounding neighborhood. As soon as the meeting was over, I began ingesting, transcoding and editing my footage, and Bill began writing and filing a new text piece. In Avid I hurriedly threw together a natsound piece from the meeting with Crespo explaining the move to the kids, some cover shots from packing belongings, and the prayer that closed the meeting. After some minutes compressing the piece in Sorenson Squeeze down to our site video publish specs, I fired up the BGAN satellite transmitter to begin transferring the video.

Crespo tells the orphans they’re moving. Shot, edited, transmitted and published that morning.

Just after I began the BGAN upload, there was some commotion at the gate. I grabbed my camera, now somewhat stripped down into “stills” mode and went to look. A large crowd from the neighborhood had gathered to beg for food, water and electricity – supplies the orphanage couldn’t spare. I fired off a few frames while it lasted and then moved to another scene where a smaller group of woman begged for water across a barbed-wire barrier. I fired off a few more frames there before the crowd dispersed. It was a tense couple of minutes.

Women from the neighborhood around Rescue Children orphanage beg for water. (David Friedman / msnbc.com

Bill went to send an update to the story he’d already filed, and I sat back down to quickly send a couple of the stills I’d just shot. My earlier video upload was done before I’d finished ingesting my new stills and the BGAN was still connected. I captioned, toned and sent one still from each crowd scene. While those were still transmitting, I heard across the garden that the church leaders had decided to move the kids that afternoon. They were packing up and evacuating their compound and Bill and I had to pack up and go with them. The website was leading with our coverage and we were loading into vehicles to follow the kids’ journey.

In a couple of hours a lot had transpired and I got good video and stills from a single camera. Could I have done the same work with separate video and still cameras? Of course. But the transition from one camera to the other would likely have taken me longer and I might have missed shots. Add to that the need to travel light and the Canon video DSLR revolutionizes my work. Oh yeah, the video quality is beautiful too!
Now some words about our gear and workflow. We’re an Avid shop and edit in the field on laptops running Avid. PluralEyes isn’t an option for us and we can’t afford to spend time manually syncing audio to every shot. But we’re also not willing to live with Canon AGC running roughshod over our sound. So our solution is to capture audio in the camera, with a JuicedLink box, external microphone(s) and running Magic Lantern firmware to get control over levels (plus other video niceties).

Was everything perfect with my kit in Haiti? Hardly. In full “video” mode, with a Sennheiser ME-66 shotgun mounted in the camera’s hotshoe and a Zacuto Z-Finder on the LCD, I couldn’t even get my eye to the stills viewfinder. If I wanted to quickly grab a still I couldn’t. So one thing I’ll change is adding a small Sennheiser MKE-400 mic to the kit for those times when I want to dynamically switch back and forth between stills and video. I’ll give up a bit of sound quality vs. the bigger shotgun, but I can still run it through the JuicedLink and Magic Lantern (Sennheiser makes a nifty XLR adapter for it), get my eye to the stills viewfinder and get a smaller, lighter rig. Also, our 5D MkII kits were so new when the earthquake struck I didn’t have an ND filter with me – that would have been a huge help shooting video outside down there. I have one now.

All of our blog posts are here (in reverse chronological order):
http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/category/1402.aspx

A slideshow of stills (also reverse chronological):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34850400/from/ET/?beginSlide=1

A playlist of the video pieces I filed while down there:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/35100898#35100898

Felix Clay about to fly with a Zacuto Tactical Shooter rig.

Based in London, I have now been shooting video on a Canon 5d Mark II DSLR regularly since the beginning of 2009 for the Guardian newspaper. Having managed with little more than the camera and a tripod to date, I have recently felt the time was right to start investing directly into the extra equipment. I’ve seen the demand for video rapidly increase from news and corporate clients over the last eighteen months and simply put, there are far more opportunities in having the skills to offer potential clients both options rather than simply stills these days.

So: having finally placing my order for a Redrock Micro rig it finally arrived the night before I was due to visit the Canon Pro Photo solutions event at the Islington Business Design Centre in London last month. I was going along to check out some of the latest Canon products (including the new Eos 1D Mark IV) but also many of the other manufacturers, whose gear I was keen to get my hands on to finally finish kitting out my rig for shooting video on DSLR’s. I duly spent an hour bolting it together watched by my bemused colleague from the Guardian Dan Chung, who was over from his base in Beijing. We were meeting for a quick drink and consultation session on my new gadget as he had been using the Redrock for sometime now, and was going to give me a few pointers on using it. Dan was scheduled to give several talks at the Expo over the following two days; talking about his experiences to date, he presented a “how to” on shooting video on a DSLR, beautifully illustrated to the audience with some short exerts from his work which demonstrated his increasing mastery over the video he shoots on DSLR’s. Along with my other colleague from the Guardian, Sean Smith, who also talked about his multimedia and video experiences, primarily from his recent “embed” trips in Afghanistan over the last couple of years; they both turned out to be one of the highlights out of the series of seminars presented at the Expo.

Overnight I was presented with my first opportunity to try the Redrock out when I received a call from the Guardian newspaper and asked to shoot an aerial video the following day of the latest developments at the Olympic site over in east London. On finding out how small the helicopter for the trip sounded, and realising how little equipment I was going to be able to take with me, I realised I’d need to re-think my approach. The door on my side of the helicopter was going to be removed, leaving nothing between me and the great outdoors but a seat belt, to allow me an unobstructed shooting area, so balancing a large-ish rig like the Redrock, changing lenses mid-flight, and everything else that might need juggling with, sounded like a nightmare, if not downright impossible. This proved a good guess as when it came to getting into the chopper and strapping in, the pilot made me go through all of my equipment that was either strapped around me or inside a host of pouches and zip pockets to take only really essential gear. He then wanted a complete demonstration of exactly how I proposed to change lenses, data cards and batteries in mid-air without dropping anything and killing someone 1500 ft or so below us.

Before I left the Expo to get to the airfield in north London, I passed by a stand showing off some of the latest Zacuto gear, rigs and viewfinders which I had noticed earlier on that day. I got chatting to Den Lennie from F-Stop Academy who was there talking to visitors, amongst other things, about the latest addition to his DVD guide series, how to shoot video on a Canon 7D. I told him where I was headed off to and he suggested I try out his Zacuto Tactical Shooter rig and the Zacuto Z-Finder as a solution to the space problem I was anticipating in the helicopter. This was an unexpected opportunity to checkout a direct rival to my rig, which I reckoned was worth postponing the Redrock experience for. As I’d not yet invested in a viewfinder, (I’m also considering the LCDVF viewfinder which is just coming onto the market and is considerably cheaper) I took both and headed up to the north London aerodrome.

Once the pilot had finished instructing me about safety with my gear we took off and headed over northeast London. We had a perfect day for it. The sun had come out after a cloudy, overcast morning and the light was soft, if slightly hazy. I had two Canon 5D Mark II’s with me (the second to grab the odd still on the way to the Olympic site) and the first sporting the very light-weight, but solidly built Zacuto rig, at the ready. The gun grip meant I could tuck the support tightly into my shoulder, which as I found out immediately, was essential to cut down on the vibrations and turbulence buffeting us. As the helicopter was so small, smaller than previous aircraft I’ve shot stills from before, motion and turbulence was going to be a problem I was simply going to have to live with. It was impossible to omit it completely, even from the final result despite the worst being edited out. Only a gyroscopic camera stabiliser would deliver perfectly smooth footage, a little out of budget for this assignment. From my confined and semi-restrained position in my seat, I found the compact size of the rig perfect for the job. It felt strong and solid, and handled intuitively. I could imagine having a similar set-up (with an added top mic attached, something like a Rode VideoMic or similar from Sennheiser) slung over one shoulder when covering a news event that looked as if it might warrant video. It would be easy to carry, would never notice knocks or scrapes and could be pulled straight to the eye and provide immediate stability for short bursts of footage – the photographers natural instinct of stills over video is always a conflict, particularly with something major unfolding in front of you, but I could have done with this set-up when covering the G20 protest in London back in April of this year (the Guardian wanted stills and video from all the photographers covering events that day). You can see the results of that day here:

Although not all of this video was shot on DSLR’s (the early footage is from a standard video camera) the latter footage when things got heated between protestors and the police, shows what is possible, especially in these types of situations, with video on a DSLR, and hand held too.

Finally, my first experience of the Zacuto Z-Finder. A piece of kit essential to judge a decent exposure in bright daylight at the minimum, something I’ve struggled with in the past for lack of one. I found an immediate problem in that my left eye is my “viewing” eye and is also much stronger than the right. Using digital DSLR’s for video requires you to view with your right eye, essentially if you are going to see where you are going and what is happening around you as you film, but also so as you don’t have to crane your neck into the side of the camera. Sports photographers will have an advantage here as many of those who have the same problem as I do now, have trained themselves to use their right eye (so as they can see over the very large lenses and follow the action of a football match or similar fast moving events). Apparently it takes years I’m told and not sure if I have the patience for that! So it’s either learn the correct way or make do with a slightly twisted, partially sited filming experience. You can at least mount the cup upside down or roll the rubber surround down to make it entirely usable if this is the situation for you too.
It also took me a while to see past the pixilation caused by looking through the Z-Finder magnifying a small screen so close, but once I’d adjusted to that it felt quite natural. Although, compared to the early days of strapping a makeshift viewfinder or even the Mark I Zacuto Z-Finder to the body of the camera with tape or rubber bands, string etc., there is now a magnetic surround that holds it in place. I did find I knocked it off a little too easily, but then I was in a confined space with a lot of equipment strapped around me, which probably exacerbated this, and there is a lanyard you can attach to either your camera strap or have around your neck to keep it flying off at the wrong moment – and in my case 1500 ft to the ground below. Overall a viewfinder is an essential piece of kit for video and I’m keen to compare it to the LCDVF version soon.
You can see the results of the video here: